The Game of Thrones TV-Show Creators Already Know What Happens at the End of the Book Series

 March 2014

Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair contributing editor Jim Windolf talks to George R. R. Martin, author of A Song of Ice and Fire, the ongoing book series on which the popular HBO show Game of Thrones is based, who tells Windolf that the show is indeed catching up to the books: “They are. Yes. It’s alarming.”

In the April issue of Vanity Fair, on stands March 13, show co-creator David Benioff tells Windolf, “Last year we went out to Santa Fe for a week to sit down with him [Martin] and just talk through where things are going, because we don’t know if we are going to catch up and where exactly that would be. If you know the ending, then you can lay the groundwork for it. And so we want to know how everything ends. We want to be able to set things up. So we just sat down with him and literally went through every character.” Martin tells Windolf, “I can give them the broad strokes of what I intend to write, but the details aren’t there yet. I’m hopeful that I can not let them catch up with me.”

Windolf reports that the presence of so many child actors in the cast, including the terrific Maisie Williams as Arya Stark, increases the time pressure. “This is a serious concern,” Martin tells Windolf. “Maisie was the same age as Arya when it started, but now Maisie is a young woman and Arya is still 11. Time is passing very slowly in the books and very fast in real life.”

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Benioff and co-creator D. B. Weiss tell Windolf that the show has a lifespan, and they would like to wrap it up after seven or eight seasons. “It doesn’t just keep on going because it can,” Weiss says. “I think the desire to milk more out of it is what would eventually kill it, if we gave in to that.”

NB: George RR Martin has released five books so far, is writing the sixth and plans on the seventh being the last in the series.